Fuselage - Center Section

2005-08-20 - Preparing the center Fuselage. (4.0 Hrs).

Four hours, four ribs deburred. I had a little problem trying some other deburring tools. After spending so much time per rib, I decided I had to do something to speed things up. The flanges take 5-10 minutes to file and deburr, but all of the cutouts for strain relief are very tedious with the standard twirl deburring tool that I like to use.

So, I decided to try some of the special deburring wheels that I have accumulated. First, I tied a small stone grinding wheel from my cheap Harbor Freight rotary tool kit. The stone bit disappeared as fast as the aluminum. Then, I tried one of the metal bits. It worked. but did not leave the cutouts smooth enough. They still needed to be cleaned-up with the deburring tool.

Next, I went to my Roloc wheel assortment. I have one thin wheel that has some scotch brite impregnated in the sides. It kind of worked, but I still had to use the deburring tool to get the corners right.

Then, I thought I would use a wire wheel. I have a few small ones that look like brass (this would be ok), but are probably just anodized steel (which is not so good to use on aluminum). Anyway, I really put some pressure on these using my electric drill, and I ended-up actually eating away the aluminum instead of deburring it. I spent another half-hour trying to clean-up the mess (see below). So, it was back to the old tried-and-true manual deburring tool. I use it like a carving knife--very slow and hard on the thumbs.

The bottom cutout is supposed to look like the one on the top rib, but because the wire wheel ate away the metal, I had to enlarge the hole quite a bit to get it smoothed out.
You can see the scratches that the wire wheel left here. This had to be polished-out with the big Scotch-Brite wheel.
Four more ribs done, that makes six, four more to go.